How one gets diarrhea while traveling

There are plenty of different ways, but the most common seems to be by eating local foods that contain some microorganisms that the local population is totally used to, but your system is not. This is different from food poisoning, of course, and that truly is something to be feared, or at least you want to take steps to avoid it. Diarrhea is just having a “loose stool” and nearly anyone who has an adventurous palette can fall victim to it once in a while.

Be prepared

Fortunately, drugs that help you through this are cheap, even in the United States. Before you leave on your RTW trip make sure you pack a small pill-pack or container of Imodium or whatever it’s called in your area. There are actual antibiotics you can take that might be even more effective, but those are more of a hassle, and these usually do the trick. If you buy them outside the United States they’ll probably be even cheaper, and they are easy to get pretty much everywhere in the world. You won’t need a prescription, and nearly every big city has one or more late night pharmacies where you can buy these things over the counter, but just buy some before you need them. Even if you are lucky enough never to need them, you might me someone else’s savior when you overhear them asking the hostel people where the pharmacy is located.

Then don’t worry too much after that

Aside from the normal warnings about food poisoning, which is another subject altogether, you really shouldn’t try to be overly cautious when trying food on the road. Food prepared at carts on the street is almost always cheap, authentic, and very safe, as long as you go to a place that’s fairly busy. Some people stick only to sit-down restaurants and hotel restaurants because they are “worried about getting sick” but as long as you’ve got some pills you would be foolish to be overly cautious.

Once that feeling hits, and you have to find a toilet ASAP, you can take a pill and within 2 hours or so you’ll be able to behave normally. You’ll want to drink as much water as you can as well, so hopefully you aren’t just about to travel. You certainly don’t want to be getting on a long bus journey when you are feeling this way, but if you are prepared the chances of that happening are pretty slim, so do yourself a favor and try all the weird stuff that appeals to you and forget about playing it so safe.

Very few people “hate Americans”

There might be some of this in parts of the Middle East, but for the most part even the most vocal critic of the USA will enthusiastically tell you how he hates the American government, but also has nothing against American people. Think about it. If you met someone from Iran or North Korea would you assume they were bad people? You might actually be sympathetic that their leaders have stirred things up and that they are victims in this whole mess. It all depends on how the person acts once the conversation has begun, and it’s easy to stay out of trouble if that’s your goal.

There are at least two major types of American travelers

These major categories tend to blend together more in, say, Europe, but in most other places you’ll see big groups of older and bigger people climbing in and out of tour buses and then waddling into 4-star hotels. Since those people often make almost no attempt to actually interact with the culture, choosing instead to just see it through a bus window, those tourists often get made fun of by locals. The other major group is the independent traveler/backpacker-type, and since this group tends to travel low to the ground and maximize their interaction with the locals, they are generally pretty well liked, or at least tolerated. If you fit into this second group the locals will generally assume you are open minded and that you are there to appreciate their home.

How to stay out of trouble

If you want to stay safe and not become unpopular, you’ll follow the age-old advice of steering clear of discussions about politics or religion. If you feel strongly about one or both this can be tricky, especially after a few beers, but trust me, you’ll never actually “win” one of these arguments, and you’ll be saving everyone lots of acrimony if you just change the subject. One slightly frustrating thing is that people who’ve never been to America, or maybe they’ve visited New York City, hear so much news about the States every day that they think they know exactly what’s going on in your hometown. Many newspapers and TV networks around the world have a bit of an anti-American tone to their stories, but the locals have no way of knowing it, so they believe it all as the gospel truth. They’ll often criticize you for not knowing who their prime minister is, or something like that, and they’ll also be sure they know more about the American governments shenanigans around the world than you do. Avoid even starting these conversations if at all possible.

Be a good guest in general

Especially early in your travel career, you might encounter many things in foreign places that seem better at home. Do yourself a favor and keep those thoughts to yourself. If you meet some locals, or even people from another country, and you start pointing out that our buses are cleaner or our grocery stores have better selections, or our TVs get way more channels, then you’ll not be welcome for long. Once you’ve traveled more this gets easier, but at first it’s very tempting to constantly compare the place you are in with your home. On the other hand, if you find something that’s better there, feel free to point it out as often as you like. People LOVE to hear that their food is better or their girls are prettier or their bars are more fun. Locals won’t care who you voted for in 2004 if you spend most of your time complimenting their country.

So, in an effort to help you take the reins and slow life down again, I bring you BootsnAll’s August RTW airfare deals. This month’s deals start in either New York or Los Angeles, and could get you either a tour of the highlights of South America; a continent-hopping itinerary from North America to South America to Africa; or a real RTW trek covering Asia, Africa, and Europe. And even the longest itinerary still comes in at under $3000.

Here are the August RTW ticket deals - these prices are good through August 31, 2008.

• Los Angeles - Lima - Santiago - Buenos Aires - Sao Paulo - Los Angeles from US$1349 (plus taxes)
• New York - Rio de Janeiro - Sao Paulo - Johannesburg - Dakar - New York from US$2249 (plus taxes)
• New York - Beijing - Hong Kong - Singapore - Bangkok - Bombay / Mumbai - Nairobi - Cairo - Athens - Rome - Copenhagen - Berlin - London - New York from US$2999 (plus taxes)

And if these itineraries don’t tickle your fancy completely, that doesn’t mean you have to twiddle your thumbs until next month’s deals come out - start planning your own customized RTW trip in seconds and hit just the cities you want.

Television can give you a more honest look at culture than anything else

When you travel to a city and then stay in the historic center you are seeing an idealized view of how life in that country really is. You might spend the afternoon at an art museum and then the evening in the nightlife district, but 99% of the real population isn’t doing that because they are working during the day and then watching a bit of TV at night. Spending a day at the Louvre might help you understand what Paris was like 300 years ago (or maybe it won’t), but it doesn’t tell you a thing about the city today.

I personally find it fascinating to watch some local news, even when I don’t understand the language, because you can always follow the stories anyway, and you’ll get a chance to see what the real locals and thinking about and worrying about at that moment. It’s also interesting to see which sports stories pop up and in which order. In some countries a big football/soccer story might be the top story of the whole broadcast, or they may be obsessed with cricket or something else. You really get the sense of what the locals care about in a hurry, much more so than by asking a bartender in a tourist pub.

Television reveals that most of us are hypocrites

If you talk to locals who work at the hostel they might tell you that people from that country mainly prefer documentaries and French films, and that they all find Hollywood blockbusters to be stupid. But flip around the dial and you’ll find out in a hurry that they probably have horrendous reality shows, plenty of dubbed American sitcoms, and Rambo-style films on every night.

Watch their version of MTV and you might be surprised. In Egypt, where every woman who isn’t a tourist or prostitute wears a scarf over their head in public, you might expect their MTV to only feature male singers and traditional songs. But in reality the music channel that is included on their basic cable shows videos with more than their fair share of scantily-clad women dancing and singing. It’s shocking and fascinating and it really shows you more about them than you could ever learn by visiting an art museum.

Moderation is best

I’m certainly not advocating anyone becoming a TV junkie while on the road, but when you have those days when you are tired of traveling and you just want to relax, don’t dismiss the idea of finding a cheap hotel room with a TV and scanning the dial a bit. You can read that paperback book anywhere in the world, but you can’t watch local TV in India unless you are actually in India.

They can hold as much as 32 gigabytes of data, although those are still quite expensive as of this writing. The 2 and 4 GB sizes are the most popular as of now. You just insert this tiny thumb-shaped thing into a USB slot on any computer, and the thing will appear on the desktop as another hard drive. There are no moving parts so they are very durable, and they get their power from the USB connection itself, so you never have to worry about plugs or power converters.

Backing up photos

The most obvious use for them is to constantly be able to back up your photos and/or video while on the road. Unless you are an experienced photographer, you’ll probably want to take digital photos in one of the compressed formats that will make each file about 1 MB in size. Now that 4 GB flash drives are cheap and common, that means you could fit about 4,000 photos on one of them. In the United States we’ve started seeing 4 GB models for around $20, and 8 GB models for about $30-40, at least on the cheap end of things. If I were leaving on a RTW trip soon I’d bring at least 2 of the large-storage ones, even if I were also bringing a laptop.

It’s a good idea to upload your photos to Flickr or another service as yet another backup system while on the road, because these things are probably fairly easy to lose, especially for those who lose things often in their regular lives. But having two flash drives will mean you can easily and quickly back up your entire collection from one to the other from time to time, and store one of them inside a compartment in your pack while you keep the other handy. Believe me, the photos of your trip will be worth a fortune to you in the years following your trip, and losing a chunk of them would be a major disaster.

Other uses for thumb drives

In addition to photos or videos, you can keep Word documents on these things, and with those you can be creative. You can keep a backup of your contact list of people you meet while on the road, so if you lose those sheets of paper or business cards you’ll have it all in one place. You could scan your passport and other identification and keep the files disguised as something else on your thumb drive. If you meet someone with a really good album you’d like to get, just hand them your thumb drive and ask them to copy it on to it for you. You might share an album you think they’d like in return.

Where to buy them

If you happen to lose one along the way or you just want to buy another to store more stuff, you should be able to buy them just about anywhere at this point. If you are starting in the US or Canada it’s probably best to buy them before you leave because things like this are more expensive in Europe and pretty much the rest of the world as well. Some people assume that in Hong Kong or Singapore or Bangkok they’ll be able to buy cheaper electronics, but that’s not usually the case. You can buy bootleg movies and software on the street in those places, but actual electronics tend to be strangely expensive, especially considered they are all made in that region in the first place.

One fairly obvious concern is cost. If you spend summer in Europe and then make your way to South America just in time for its own summer, you’ll be paying peak hotel rates and airfares each step of the way. Since expenses are such a concern for nearly every RTW traveler, you might actually be better off trying to do the exact opposite as the above.

The other part of this issue is that when you travel to a place during its peak season you’ll have the most competition for hostel beds and cheap hotel rooms. Those of us who like to wing it and book places as we go on a RTW can be severely hampered by this situation because it means either booking beds way in advance or sometimes having to stay in undesirable places or neighborhoods.

Traveling to places in the off-season, on the other hand, gives you full flexibility in addition to lower prices for just about everything. If you arrive in Venice in February, you can pretty much just show up and choose a bed at one of the hostels there, or you might even find a budget hotel that is so empty that their rooms are almost as cheap as the hostels.

The other factor to consider when deciding which places to hit in-season and which to hit in the off-season is the crowd and chaos level. Again with Venice, Italy as an example, if you ask 5 people who’ve only visited there in summer what they thought of the place, most or all will tell you that it’s interesting but not worth it due to insane crowds and outrageous prices. But ask 5 people who’ve gone there outside of summer and they’ll probably all tell you the place is fantastic and they don’t know why so many people complain about it.

London is another example of this. From June through August, the entire city center feels like being in a crowded theme park on a weekend, except you are trapped inside for the duration. All the main attractions are just so jammed with people that you’ll wind up skipping things like the (free) British Museum or a trip by Buckingham Palace, all because the crowds are so thick that enjoyment is impossible.

Of course you have to sort this out on a region-by-region basis, and it’s impossible to visit each city at just the right time, but you should really think twice about trying to hit peak seasons in big cities. You’ll get a bit stressed dealing with the huge crowds while on a RTW, so visiting many places when they are a bit empty can really help you from getting burned out, and keep your expenses lower as well.

The routes on this month’s special fares list start in either San Francisco, New York, or Los Angeles. The first takes in the highlights of Asia for $1799, including Angkor Wat, Bangkok, Xian, and Tokyo. The second gets you from South Africa to Bali to Bangkok, al for under $2300. And even our most expensive RTW trip deal for July is under $2500 - and it’ll let you see two of Europe’s most amazing cities (London and Paris) as well as world-class destinations in South Africa and China as well.

Here are the July RTW ticket deals - these prices are good through July 31, 2008.

• San Francisco - Singapore - Saigon / Ho Chi Minh - surface - Hanoi - Luang Phrabang - Angkor Wat (Siem Reap) - Bangkok - Xian - surface - Beijing - Tokyo - San Francisco from US$1799 (plus taxes)
• New York - Cape Town - Bali (Denpasar) - Singapore - Bangkok - Hong Kong - New York from US$2299 (plus taxes)
• Los Angeles - London - Paris - Cape Town - surface - Johannesburg - Hong Kong - Beijing - Los Angeles from US$2499 (plus taxes)

And if these itineraries don’t tickle your fancy completely, that doesn’t mean you have to twiddle your thumbs until next month’s deals come out - start planning your own customized RTW trip in seconds and hit just the cities you want.

Finding out who’s playing where and when

Of course, the first thing you need to do is find out where an artist you like (enough) is playing and when. Years ago that was very difficult, but today it’s a snap. Not many people seem to know about the concert trade publication called Pollstar, and they don’t really market themselves to consumers, but still they do a great job keeping track of nearly every tour in the world. Simply go to Pollstar.com and you can check itineraries of artists or schedules for cities for everything up to one year in advance. Most concerts don’t get scheduled until 3 or 4 months before they happen, so you can’t expect the site to predict events that aren’t yet confirmed, but if you keep checking you’ll see everything.

Seeing a major artist in another city (especially one where English isn’t the first language) can be a real novelty, but if you get lucky to go out of your way a bit you might be able to catch some band you really like that’s doing a small club tour of a far-off country or region. You aren’t likely to catch your favorite obscure band in Bangkok, but you might catch them in Buenos Aires or Athens or Melbourne.

Buying tickets

Also thanks to the internet, you can usually buy advanced concert tickets to most shows online for a small “convenience charge.” Sure, some shows sell out right away, but in many countries they do mostly festival seating and people don’t buy tickets until the day of the show. Every situation might be a bit different, although if there are artists you are really fond of it’s pretty easy to stay on top of things.

What if a concert is sold out?

You might be screwed if tickets to your show are sold out, but not necessarily. First off, most major cities have a craigslist now, and tickets to concerts are pretty popular on all of them, often sold by people who can’t attend and just want their money back. More good news (sort of) comes with the fact that there are ticket resellers or scalpers at most any event that’s sold out. They work about the same way in most places. You’ll often see amateurs who bought too many tickets for their group or had a late cancellation, and you’ll see the pros who go around saying they need tickets because they want to buy more cheap tickets from amateurs even though they have several for sale already themselves. You might have to pay a lot, or you might not. But if you see an artist you fancy is out touring the world during the same time you are, catching a show might be very possible and extremely memorable.

But before we discuss doing laundry on the road, let’s talk about packing and your choice of garments. You really should choose most of your gear based on the idea that you’ll wash it yourself, and more importantly dry it yourself too. Jeans are automatically out because they are hard to wash and even harder to dry. You’ll want as many of your items as possible to be such that they can dry in 8 hours while hanging in a dark (and maybe even damp) room. Do yourself a favor and spend a bit extra on socks and trousers that are meant to dry quickly, and you’ll be glad you did.

So even though you will have clothes that can potentially dry quickly while hanging in a hostel room or other such place, you’ll realize after the first time or two that doing your own laundry in a hostel sink takes way longer than you’d think it would, and also ages your clothes about five times more quickly than having them professionally washed. Go ahead and bring some of those dry packets of Woolite or whatever so you can wash some of your clothes now and then, but don’t assume that this is how you’ll do it each time.

The good news is that finding places to do laundry on the road is easier than you might expect. If you are staying in hostels you’ll find that some of them will let you use their machines (for a small fee) during the part of the day when they aren’t doing the sheets and towels, and at the very least every hostel will be able to tell you where to find the nearest Laundromat or full service “fluff & fold” place.

More good news comes with the fact that these services tend to be quite cheap in most countries you’ll probably be visiting as well. In Northern Europe or Australia you might have to seek out coin Laundromats and spend a couple hours there on one of your off days, but in most of the world you can get a load of laundry done in a short time for about the cost of two beers in a bar (which can be as cheap as US$1 each in some countries). You’ll discover this is money well spent most of the time, even if it means having to actually skip out on buying two beers in order to pay for it.

One thing you should be prepared for is doing partial loads in a sink in order to buy yourself another couple days to get to a better location for the next full load. Sink-washing 2 t-shirts and 2 pairs of underwear isn’t so bad once in a while, but when you have to wear them the next morning just to try to get them even a little dry with your own body heat you’ll be plenty ready for a proper wash done by someone else soon enough.

With so many jobs being able to be performed remotely these days, it’s not too difficult for many people to pick up some freelance work that they can do on a laptop from anywhere. If you have any talent as a writer, editor, graphic designer, website builder or anything along those lines, you might consider developing that skill in advance so you can do some work while on the road.

One of the advantages of this sort of thing, especially when traveling solo, is that it can give you a sense of purpose and a bit of structure that you’ll otherwise lack for months at a time. Let’s say you build simple websites and you’ve got your laptop with you. If you get a job that will take you 20 hours or so, and it’s got to be completed within two weeks, you can easily schedule yourself enough 4 or 5-hour blocks to get the thing done on time without sacrificing your sightseeing and partying lifestyle.

If you are good at your chosen skill and you get good clients you could literally pay your way just working a few hours a day. It’s quite easy to bum around Southeast Asia on $30 per day or so, and if you can even earn $15 per hour you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you are actually paying your way as you go (in those parts of the world) in only a couple hours a day. And if you meet people who are all going to a temple in the morning, it’ll actually make you sound like a badass if you tell them you’ll catch up with them later on because you’ve got some important work to do.

Another advantage of this sort of strategy is that you can take breaks from traveling when you want if you get a lucrative job to work on. Let’s say you are in Buenos Aires and you get an offer for a job that will make you $1,000 and take you 2 weeks working almost full-time. Suddenly you are a working citizen of Buenos Aires for two weeks, and you are going out every evening in a new city as well. If hostels or hotels there are too expensive, you can move out to a cheaper city until the project is done.

Of course, all this makes getting these kinds of jobs a bit easier than it is. Many people have valuable skills that aren’t easily translated onto a laptop in a hotel room. You can try to get jobs locally while you travel, but this is much more of a challenge and worth another post altogether. But if you can work on a laptop and your trip is a year or so away, you might want to try to arrange some clients for when you’ll be gone. If you start early enough and work the craigslist scene (and others like it) you might be able to be able to mix a bit of working with a lot of traveling in a very pleasant and fulfilling way.